Upgrade to Direct Fills for faster, more reliable and more automatic fills to Google Sheets

[heather]

Filling Google Sheets in Two Steps

For a long time with Tiller if you wanted your bank transactions in your Google Sheet immediately you needed to launch the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar and “fill” the data after a refresh, or wait for the fill to happen later in the day. Many customers got it, one even said they wanted a coffee mug that said “Refresh & Fill,” but most people didn’t understand and it created quite a bit of friction and confusion. “Why do I need to take this extra step? You said it was automatic.”

Now Fills are Immediate & Automatic for Google Sheets

With Direct Fills that’s no longer the case. Direct Fills is our new faster, more reliable and more automatic way to get your daily spending, transactions, and balances in your Google Sheets. You refresh your account on the Tiller Console, or it refreshes automatically, and your data just appears in your spreadsheet and is there waiting for you when you’re ready.

In early December 2025 we began slowly rolling out Direct Fills for some new customers. In February we turned it on as the default for all newly linked Google Sheets. Today we’re excited to share that there is a seamless upgrade path to switch your existing Sidebar Fills sheets to Direct Fills.

You can learn more about the differences between Direct Fills and Sidebar Fills on our Help Center here and you can learn more about how to upgrade your sheet to Direct Fills here, but it’s pretty simple.

1. Visit the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com
2. Click the name of the spreadsheet you want to upgrade to expand it
3. Click the Upgrade button

If you don’t see an upgrade button it’s most likely because your sheet is already using Direct Fills. Click on the Settings tab to review the Fill Service for that spreadsheet to confirm.

Why the move?

The move to Direct Fills and away Sidebar Fills for all Google Sheets is part of our commitment to offer the best experience for getting your bank data into your spreadsheets and we believe this is the most reliable and scalable approach.

It also unlocks a ton of potential capabilities for Tiller including on-the-go mobile workflows and faster data processing for things like AutoCat rules. We’re excited about many of the developments underway that rely on the Direct Fills technology that you’ll be hearing about soon.

Changes to AutoCat

You’ll also notice that the “Run AutoCat” button for Direct Fills sheets has been elevated to its own button on the Tiller Console when you click on a Direct Fills spreadsheet. Now there is a sub menu on the Run AutoCat button with the Run Rules on All option.

The Run Rules on All feature allows you to run your AutoCat rules against all your transactions, rather than only those that are uncategorized. This feature has long been available for the Sidebar Fills version of AutoCat and we wanted to be sure it was ready before releasing the upgrade path to Direct Fills.

You can read more about how the Run Rules on All feature works here, but it comes in particularly handy if you’ve come into Tiller with the Pre-Categorize feature enabled and you want to rework your transaction categorizations using AutoCat rules.

What about Excel?

I’m sure many of you are wondering, “What about Excel?” Now that we’ve validated this approach is viable for Google Sheets our team is working on our approach for Excel. The technology is completely different between the platforms. Our founding was in Google Sheets and we’re just that much more familiar with how it works, so it’s an easy starting place when we want to try new things. Excel is important to us and we’re working hard to understand what’s possible there too.

Let us know what you think

Have a question or feedback about Direct Fills or this upgrade? Reply with a comment below or reach out to our support team via the chat tool in the lower right corner of the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com.

[gregory.klassen]

…and it works GREAT!

thanks

[josh.m.sharpe]

“See, edit, create and delete all of your Google Sheets spreadsheet”.
This is super scary - and under no circumstances would I ever approve this. Tiller should not own aggregated access to many people’s google drive. Yikes!

Have ya’ll considered providing a service account email and allowing users to share their sheet with the service account. Then, separately, provide the URL to the sheet?

It’s arguably, similarly abrasive to the existing add-on onboarding experience, but gives you the same benefits of the oauth integration of “Direct fill” without the extreme security overreach.

Candidly, I’ve been using it successfully for personal projects for a long long time - no idea if it scales or what limits GCP puts on this type of setup.

[heather]

Thanks for this feedback @josh.m.sharpe - we are considering alternate approaches to “connect” a sheet to the Direct Fills service, but we haven’t decided if/when that would be available.

While you are granting Tiller access to “See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Sheets spreadsheets" as a part of that Authorize Sheets step, this describes the broad capability of the permission category from Google, but it does not reflect how Tiller actually interacts with your documents.

Because these permissions are bundled together and are required for the API we need to be able to directly write to your spreadsheet and the way we have the solution currently implemented, we cannot request a more restricted scope.

We only interact with spreadsheets where we have access to its specific ID, and we only receive that ID when you intentionally connect a sheet to Tiller. Without you handing us that specific ID, we cannot see or access your other files.

[afridlyand]

Hi Heather,
I have upgraded to direct fill and it seems autocat has stopped working.
Thanks,
Alex

[heather]

@afridlyand can you please write in to support@tillerhq.com with this issue and provide as much detail as possible so we can troubleshoot further. This is not the proper troubleshooting channel thanks!

[daveahlers]

I’ve been using this for a few months. It’s funny when I’m looking at my sheet and suddenly new transactions appear. Very nice integration.

One area where manual intervention is still required: using the old sidebar approach you were notified if there was a synchronization issue. Without ever pulling up the side bar, I now have to look in my daily email to see if the data has stopped flowing.

The transactions tab doesn’t currently have space for this, but for example, if the top row was a status row for account synchronization, users could receive messages in a cell without having to pull up the sidebar. Something like: “one account more than 24 hours old.“

[heather]

Thanks @daveahlers - some upcoming improvements to the Tiller Console will also be helping with this and hopefully make it more useful generally so people go there first, rather than straight to their spreadsheet.

One tip for this is to take a look at the Balances sheet in your spreadsheet as it will have the last updated date of your accounts there to help you identify stale connections.

[josh.m.sharpe]

Yea, but “we super duper promise to do gud things with your data” isn’t a real security approach

[heather]

@josh.m.sharpe I hear you and we’ll continue evaluating feedback from others as we consider alternate approaches to how to access the Direct Fills service. There is no requirement to upgrade at this time if you’re uncomfortable with the scopes.

[mikerioux7]

I followed your directions in this email and I didn’t see any “Upgrade” link.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
Mike Rioux

[heather]

@mikerioux7 you may not need to upgrade and may already be using Direct Fills

If you visit the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com and click on the name of your spreadsheet click on the Settings option and scroll down to see what Fill Service is listed there. If it’s “Direct Fills” then no action is needed from you.

[peter]

We share your thinking. We always prefer narrow scopes, and we actually would have shipped this a year earlier if we found a way to do it that was a great user experience with narrower scopes. Ultimately we know this feature is a big win for customers, we take seriously the scopes provided (even those we do not use), and we’re excited to offer it. We’ve asked Google for narrower control over permissions and scopes, and looking ahead, we’ll continue to consider new ways to offer this with narrower scopes.

[casilverthorn.96]

I’ve been using the direct fills since the beginning of the year as part of the trial, using it along side my regular side fills sheet. I love the new direct fills; it makes things much quicker for me. Thanks for all the hard work to make this available to sheets users. Here’s hoping an excel version comes soon.

[djsanch12]

might be a dumb question (or i missed it) but does updating the manual accounts on the console also automatically update in the spreadsheet?

[casilverthorn.96]

If you have the account linked in your sheet via the console, then updating the account in the console reflects in your spreadsheet.

[djsanch12]

thanks @casilverthorn.96

[mikerioux7]

Hi Heather,
Mine does not say direct fill but instead says Side bar fill. I do not see any upgrade link. What do you recommend?

Mike

[jono]

Updated all my sheets. All seems to be working well so far.

[dsj421]

I turned on direct fills about an hour and a half ago and see this message in the activity logs however none of my balances have updated since yesterday. Is there anything I need to do to ensure balances update? Or will this just occur naturally at some point?